More (not so) fun facts:
54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level.
21% read below a 5th grade level, which is considered functionally illiterate.
High immigration numbers don't fully explain it either, as first gen immigrants only make up about 1/3 of those with low literacy.
Is it backsliding or has it always been this bad?
it's never been better if you are rich.
if you are not rich, it's backsliding.
same with the economy too. if you are rich, you'll never done better, but if you aren't, you can't get ahead no matter how hard you try.
40 years ago the difference between being rich and poor, didn't matter as much in terms of education and opportunity. there wasn't a huge gulf between rich schools and poor schools. now there is a huge gulf between rich schools and middle class schools.
This seems to be hard to tell from the data. While the others are right that there have been recent downward movement, the country is old and we don't have data going back very far.
basic literacy has almost certainly increased (meaning one can write a sentence about onesself, and read it). The large majority of Americans meet this bar (and the rest are children or quite old/sick), while only ~80% met this bar 100 years ago.
But it seems we haven't kept data on reading level for very long. The wikipedia page is pretty good afaict. I suspect what actually matters for democracy and such is the literacy rate of voters, though I haven't seen great data on it. We know a large share of folks don't vote, I would guess this correlates very strongly with literacy.
Also, there's a relevant confounder here (which the wikipedia page highlights): one can be american and not speak english, but still be literate in their childhood language.
Definitely backsliding.
We used to teach phonics, now a lot of schools use some bullshit called three-cueing which literally teaches kids to guess words they don't recognize.
“By the 1990s and early 2000s, research began to conclude that phonics was the necessary method of teaching reading to children, with an American congressional panel in 2000 concluding that the essential components of reading instruction were "vocabulary, comprehension and phonics". Programs began to re-incorporate phonics around this time, although three cueing remained a part of curriculums in the approaches of balanced literacy and whole language.[1][4] As of 2020, an estimated 75% of American teachers used three cueing”
I agree that we have made recent changes that were bad. But we've also expanded access to free lunches in some places, decreased some extreme poverty metrics, have expanded AuDD diagnosis and treatment, raised the minimum wage in a handful of large metro areas, etc.
Is it obvious that a worse teaching method (and the many other bits of bad policy) does more damage than the improvements? This isn't clear to me.
Considering the post and comments are about literacy specifically, and those things you mentioned don’t really have anything to do with literacy directly, I’m gunna go with yes.
A worse teaching method would produce many generations of uneducated people. And education is important because even with all these advancements made right now, if in the future the people fail to keep up with it, its going to be nothing.
It's backsliding It's the constant war for defunding education that Republicans fight as soon as they get in
There's a reason why Republicans are constantly cutting school funding, and pushing idiotic policies that basically force school resources to get diverted and underperformers to be passed regardless of readiness.